More bad news news on the Obama foreign policy front, at least for lefty internationalists like me, and and also for traditional realists equally opposed to the neoconservatism and crusading, interventionist liberalism and American exceptionalism that held sway during much of the Bush administration. Foreign Policy's "The Cable" is reporting the appointment of neo-cold warrior Michael McFaul, of Stanford and the conservative Hoover Institute, as senior director for Russian affairs at the NSC, and special assistant to the President.

McFaul is, among other dubious connections, one of the "international patrons" of the Henry Jackson Society, a sort of UK extension of the neoconservative movement, whose other patrons are a veritable Who's Who of neoconservative poobahs, and include: Max Boot, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Dore Gold, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Clifford May, Joshua Muravchik, Richard Perle, Natan Sharansky, Stephen Solarz and James Woolsey.

An enthusiast for NATO expansion and a confrontational approach toward Russia, McFaul serves on the boards of a variety of foundations and funds engaged in the permanent Washington and Western push against the Russian state, and in shoveling money to myriad anti-Moscow actors in the former Soviet Union. McFaul is a bona fide Jacobin fanatic preaching global revolution and regime change. In 2002, McFaul wrote the following in the conservative Hoover Foundation Journal, *Policy Review*:

"The United States cannot be content with preserving the current order in the international system. Rather, the United States must become once again a revisionist power - a country that seeks to change the international system as a means of enhancing its own national security. Moreover, this mission must be offensive in nature. The United States cannot afford to wait and react to the next attack. Rather, we must seek to isolate and destroy our enemies by eliminating their regimes and safe havens. The ultimate purpose of American power is the creation of an international community of democratic states that encompasses every region of the planet."

Of course, we won't hear much about what McFaul is actually doing in the shadows at the NSC. But it won't be good.

This is just the latest evidence that the Obama administration's foreign policy has been thoroughly captured by the reigning foreign policy royalty and usual suspects in the seemingly impregnable establishment citadels of the think-tankery.  The same crowing fools and romantic nationalists who brought us Iraq still rule the roost.  And Obama has apparently "reached out" to every foreign policy camp in the establishment - but not at all to the left which helped nominate him.  The left has instead been ignored and smacked down in the most humiliating way possible.  Not a single representative.  Stiffed.

Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, James Jones, Michael McFaul, Robert Gates.  The Obama seems poised to drag the United States, and our children, into another round of bloody, costly and self-destructive overseas adventures, on a quixotic quest to "restore American power" to its triumphalist glory days peak, and to shove the American way of life into every orifice of the global body politic.

But this time, adventurers will be assisted by an army of brain-dead, ditto-headed, Democratic sycophants, eager to follow St. Barack anywhere he leads them.